Two pieces of writing on the work — what's changing in UX, and what stays the same. Built for a coffee-length read.
User experience is no longer just about making products easy to use. It's about creating products that feel intuitive and give users great experiences — from the first time they touch it to every time after that.
In today's competitive market, new technologies like AI, AR, VR, and ML are changing how we think about UX. But here's what I keep coming back to: these technologies are tools. The fundamental work — understanding what users want, how they think, what they're trying to accomplish — that hasn't changed at all.
What has changed is the velocity of expectation. Users who've experienced AI-personalised interfaces at home bring those expectations to enterprise software at work. The gap between what enterprise products offer and what users now expect has never been wider — and that gap is exactly where good UX work lives.
In my own practice, I've worked with AI and ML on personalised displays for customer care associates, AR/VR for technicians installing network infrastructure, and GPT-powered content generation in B2B products. In every case, the technology wasn't the design challenge. The challenge was the same as always: how do we help a specific person do a specific thing as well as possible? The tools just changed.
The designers who will matter most in the next decade aren't the ones who master every new tool first. They're the ones who stay anchored to human behaviour while everything else shifts around them.
After more than a decade working in UX — and a good chunk of that time mentoring designers at various stages of their careers — I've noticed a consistent gap between what design education emphasises and what actually makes someone good at this work.
The gap isn't technical skill. Most people entering the field can learn Figma. It's not even process knowledge — there are enough design thinking frameworks floating around that anyone can recite the steps. The gap is in knowing how to navigate ambiguity, how to hold a position when stakeholders push back, and how to make design decisions when the evidence is incomplete and the deadline isn't.
Here's what I focus on when mentoring:
Emphasise user research early and often. Research isn't a phase — it's a mindset. Designers who learn to be curious about users before they're curious about solutions make better decisions at every stage of the process. I include hands-on research in every engagement I supervise, even when there's time pressure not to.
Teach collaboration, not just craft. The best design work I've seen comes from teams that build on each other's ideas during the define stage — whiteboarding, questioning, pushing back. I deliberately structure early-career experiences around collaborative problem-solving rather than solo execution.
Make accessibility non-negotiable from day one. Designers who learn to design inclusively from the start don't need to "add" accessibility later — it's already in their thinking. Designers who treat it as a checklist always produce worse work.
The young generation of designers is heavily immersed in technology and brings genuine enthusiasm for new tools. The job of mentorship is to redirect that enthusiasm toward the harder, less glamorous questions: Who is this for? What do they actually need? How do we know if we got it right?